Egypt’s Continuing Experiments in Social Media

What role social media will play in post-revolutionary Egypt is still up in the air. The revolution showed everyone the power such media could wield as a medium for social change, as well as the difficulties in controlling it. Social media has also proven a catalyst for internal debate and change–and a greater degree of transparency–within the Muslim Brotherhood. Yet the Shebab al-Facebook youth movements are not the only ones using social media for political action any more. Many others are also experimenting.

The prosecutor general announced the detention of Hosni Mubarak on Facebook, rather than calling a press conference or releasing the information through state media, as would have been the practice in the past. This allows him to release information to the media generally, and avoid the questions that would arise at a live press conference. It also suggests that the relationship between government agencies and state media has become ambiguous. The prosecutor no longer wants to favor state media, or he is concerned state media would ask the same probing questions as independent and international media, or both.

A week later, some 1400 university professors used Facebook as a vehicle to demand the removal of Higher Education Minister Amr Ezzat Salama and demand reforms of higher education. The Facebook page called for demonstrations before the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces on April 16 (several hundred reportedly showed up), and posted a list of requests to the council and to Prime Minister Essam Sharaf.

[Under the Mubarak regime, university presidents and deans were often appointed on the basis of State Security recommendations — based on loyalty to the  regime — rather than experience or demonstrated ability. The primary request is that all senior administrators be removed and replaced with others elected from university staff by the end of the academic year. The professors also demand a gradual increase in their salary scheme until it is on par with that of the judiciary, a reformulation of the scholarship system and the formation of a syndicate for university staff.]

A media ecology refers to the dynamic, complex system in which media technologies interact with each other and with other social and cultural systems within a particular social field, and the ways these interrelationships shape the production, flow, and consumption of images, texts and information within this system. In Egypt’s current revolutionary phase, the media ecology is unstable, in flux, as the myriad of institutions and technologies adapt to the dramatically changed–and changing–economic, social and political climate.

The notion of a media ecology assumes that changes in any one part of the system will likely have affects on most other parts of the system. Social media revealed in January a set of crucial political capacities that in turn affected all the other major elements in the media ecology. Following the uprisings, the inability of the Shebab al-Facebook to produce a “No” vote on the constitutional referendum, or to generate significant protest against the military for the detention and torture of protesters March 9, emphasized its limitations, even as the protests April 8 for the prosecution of Mubarak showed that social media still could exert considerable political power under the right conditions.

Egypt is currently in an experimental phase, and these two incidents, like the prosecution of Maikel Nabil, (and experiments in political writing in the press and political coverage on television) are examples of hundreds of contingent actions which will collectively restructure Egypt’s media ecology as the revolution continues to unfold.